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There have been a lot of discussions on Google Search quality lately on HN. (eg here: [1]) I wonder how much of the negative sentiment towards Google is partia

There have been a lot of discussions on Google Search quality lately on HN. (eg here: [1]) I wonder how much of the negative sentiment towards Google is partially motivated by subconscious dissatisfaction with their main product. I think I'm probably guilty of that. Others have mentioned that the web environment has changed a lot and I've come to agree. PageRank style algorithms are probably pretty useless in an era of low effort reposts, aggregators, optimizing for clicks and a large SEO industry. In addition, most of the user-generated content is now inside "walled gardens" like Facebook, Instagram and Reddit, and is either impossible to index, or much harder to quantify and rank than websites linking to each other. There has to be something better out there, but it will be a difficult challenge. Ironically, the thing I would appreciate most is a manually curated, Wikipedia inspired, hierarchical directory. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21515181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21515181

ci5er 7y ago
> Ironically, the thing I would appreciate most is a manually curated, Wikipedia inspired, hierarchical directory. Yahoo?
- riffraff 7y ago
  More like the now defunct DMOZ, I'd say.
  - Hoasi 7y ago
    > More like the now defunct DMOZ DMOZ was a good idea, but the execution was biased because curated lists invite partiality. You might build something better only if you could mitigate this natural tendency.
- mch82 7y ago
  Fun fact... This is how search engines started. One of the first steps in early SEO was to get your site listed on a manually curated web directory. VLIB, the first web directory, still operates at http://vlib.org/ http://vlib.org/. List of Web Directories, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories
  - ci5er 7y ago
    Uh, yeah. Jerry Yang when he was a VLSI student at Stanford, and I was a lowly semiconductor designer at Motorola Japan used to talk about these things, so ... yeah: I was being sardonic. EDIT: He used to say to me: "[WhateverMyNameIs]! Nobody is going to pay a penny per newspaper article or a nickel for a song!". And I'd say: "Jerry! Nobody is going to pay to advertise on your personal curated bookmark list!". Turns out that one of us was right. And it wasn't me.
  - fwip 7y ago
    Looks like VLIB is rotting though - the first link I clicked (Electrical and Electronics Engineering) seems to belong to a domain squatter now.
microtherion 7y ago
When I started increasingly using DDG a while ago, it was primarily because I (1) thought it was "good enough" and (2) I wanted to preserve some diversity in the search ecosystem. But by now, DDG is simply better. An important use case for search for me is to copy and paste URLs for discussions etc. Google will still show original URLs when I hover over their links, but when I COPY them, I don't get the URL, but some redirect link through Google. At best, those are ugly and confusing when pasted into text. At worst, for e.g. image URLs, naïve processing may not longer recognize them as images because the suffix is buried deep in the redirect link. DDG gives original URLs, As Sir Timothy Wanted Them. Additionally, for image search, I get the impression that yandex gives more relevant results, although I don't have hard data to back that up.
- seppel 7y ago
  > Google will still show original URLs when I hover over their links, but when I COPY them, I don't get the URL, but some redirect link through Google. Google is doing that for a very long time. I use this extension to get rid of it: https://palant.de/2011/11/28/google-yandex-search-link-fix/ https://palant.de/2011/11/28/google-yandex-search-link-fix/
Falkon1313 7y ago
>Ironically, the thing I would appreciate most is a manually curated, Wikipedia inspired, hierarchical directory. Those are subject to the limitations of hierarchies [1]. They don't work well beyond a quite small data set. And for a directory curated by someone else, you would need it to be someone that organizes things in exactly the same way as you would. Tagging and faceting can help a bit with that in the early stages of growth, but ironically you ultimately need a way to search the contents of the hierarchy. [1] https://wiki.c2.com/?LimitsOfHierarchies https://wiki.c2.com/?LimitsOfHierarchies

ci5er 7y ago

> Ironically, the thing I would appreciate most is a manually curated, Wikipedia inspired, hierarchical directory. Yahoo?

riffraff 7y ago
More like the now defunct DMOZ, I'd say.
- Hoasi 7y ago
  > More like the now defunct DMOZ DMOZ was a good idea, but the execution was biased because curated lists invite partiality. You might build something better only if you could mitigate this natural tendency.
mch82 7y ago
Fun fact... This is how search engines started. One of the first steps in early SEO was to get your site listed on a manually curated web directory. VLIB, the first web directory, still operates at http://vlib.org/ http://vlib.org/. List of Web Directories, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories
- ci5er 7y ago
  Uh, yeah. Jerry Yang when he was a VLSI student at Stanford, and I was a lowly semiconductor designer at Motorola Japan used to talk about these things, so ... yeah: I was being sardonic. EDIT: He used to say to me: "[WhateverMyNameIs]! Nobody is going to pay a penny per newspaper article or a nickel for a song!". And I'd say: "Jerry! Nobody is going to pay to advertise on your personal curated bookmark list!". Turns out that one of us was right. And it wasn't me.
- fwip 7y ago
  Looks like VLIB is rotting though - the first link I clicked (Electrical and Electronics Engineering) seems to belong to a domain squatter now.

microtherion 7y ago

When I started increasingly using DDG a while ago, it was primarily because I (1) thought it was "good enough" and (2) I wanted to preserve some diversity in the search ecosystem. But by now, DDG is simply better. An important use case for search for me is to copy and paste URLs for discussions etc. Google will still show original URLs when I hover over their links, but when I COPY them, I don't get the URL, but some redirect link through Google. At best, those are ugly and confusing when pasted into text. At worst, for e.g. image URLs, naïve processing may not longer recognize them as images because the suffix is buried deep in the redirect link. DDG gives original URLs, As Sir Timothy Wanted Them. Additionally, for image search, I get the impression that yandex gives more relevant results, although I don't have hard data to back that up.

seppel 7y ago
> Google will still show original URLs when I hover over their links, but when I COPY them, I don't get the URL, but some redirect link through Google. Google is doing that for a very long time. I use this extension to get rid of it: https://palant.de/2011/11/28/google-yandex-search-link-fix/ https://palant.de/2011/11/28/google-yandex-search-link-fix/

Falkon1313 7y ago

>Ironically, the thing I would appreciate most is a manually curated, Wikipedia inspired, hierarchical directory. Those are subject to the limitations of hierarchies [1]. They don't work well beyond a quite small data set. And for a directory curated by someone else, you would need it to be someone that organizes things in exactly the same way as you would. Tagging and faceting can help a bit with that in the early stages of growth, but ironically you ultimately need a way to search the contents of the hierarchy. [1] https://wiki.c2.com/?LimitsOfHierarchies https://wiki.c2.com/?LimitsOfHierarchies